Electronic devices, including portable electronic devices, have gained widespread use and can provide a variety of functions including, for example, telephonic, electronic messaging and other personal information manager (PIM) application functions. Portable electronic devices can include several types of devices for communication including mobile stations such as simple cellular telephones, smart telephones and wireless PDAs. These devices run on a wide variety of networks from data-only networks such as Mobitex and DataTAC to complex voice and data networks such as GSM/GPRS, CDMA, EDGE, UMTS and CDMA2000 networks.
Upon receipt of a communication, such as a telephone call or an electronic message, output is commonly provided from the electronic device in the form of a notification of receipt of the communication or in the form of text on a display. For example, upon receipt of a telephone call, an audible notification such as a ring tone may be provided along with visual notification on the display such as a caller identification. Similarly, upon receipt of an email message, for example, audible and visual notifications may be received. Further, text of the email is displayed in response to opening the email message.
In many instances, an audible output is preferable to a text output, for example, for providing output for a person engaged in driving a vehicle or for providing output to a visually impaired person. In such instances, reading a display screen on a portable electronic device may be very difficult or even dangerous. Thus, the audible output from a speaker is preferred to visual output from a display device. Unfortunately, less information is provided via an audible output as, for example, notifications in the form of, for example, ring tones can be provided while other information such as caller identification, email originator identification or text content of an email is not provided. While text can be provided by, for example an audible file such as a .wav file, using text-to-speech conversion, the addition of such an audible file to the transmitted text significantly increases transmitted data resulting in greater required bandwidth and increased transmission time and cost for the user of the portable electronic device. Further, conversion of text does not provide information such as the identification of a caller or an email originator, for example.
Improvements in audible output of notifications and text are therefore desired.